Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

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Mac in the Produce Aisle

Why Steve Jobs is bigger in Japan than the Hollywood A-list combined.

By Maria Popova

It’s no secret we’re huge (HUGE) Mac fans. But if there’s one place were fanboy culture is at its most extreme, it has to be Japan.

Case in point: One Japanese Mac fan decided to take both his love of Apple and the term “branding” to literal levels by “tattooing” a crop of Fiji apples with the Apple and iPod logos.

How?

Pretty much the same way sun tattoos work — you slap a sticker before the skin pigments and the shape gets imprinted on it. Because apples get their pigment from sunlight as they ripen, the Apple enthusiast just stickered them a month before the harvest…

… and just waited for nature to run its due course.

Well, it seems like Steve Jobs has out-big-in-Japanned any Hollywood celebrity. Jack Bauer can endorse all the low-cal drinks he wants, but we don’t see his image and likeness on any produce, now do we?

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Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters.

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Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

midweek newsletter

Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

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